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The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women Nellie Cashman: A nurse, businesswoman, and gold prospector Aunt Clara Brown: A former slave who became a community leader Abigail Scott Duniway: An Oregon Trail suffragette María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: The first Mexican-American author to write in English Luzena Stanley Wilson: A California gold rush entrepreneur Mother Jones: A schoolteacher who became a prominent labor and community organizer Zitkala-Sa: A Sioux writer, editor, musician, teacher, and political activist Mary Hallock Foote: A mining town author and illustrator Martha Hughes Cannon: A frontier doctor, state senator, and women’s rights activist Donaldina Cameron: The most loved and feared woman in San Francisco’s Chinatown Charley Parkhurst: The most celebrated stagecoach driver in the West Makaopiopio: One of the first Hawaiian immigrants to settle the colony of Iosepa

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MONSON

On Sale Date: September 2016 Biography \ History • Hardcover • 6 x 9 • $19.99 • 208 pages ISBN 978-1-62972-227-6 • eBook ISBN 978-1-62973-468-2

FRONTIER GRIT The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women

The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women

Marianne Monson holds a BA in English Literature, an MA in English Pedagogy, and an MFA in Creative Writing. The author of two historical novels, she has a strong interest in the relationship between literature and history.

FRONTIER GRIT

Discover the stories of twelve women who “heard the call” to settle the west and who came from all points of the globe to begin their journey. As a slave, Clara watched as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter, as a free woman, six decades later. As a young girl, Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver that ever lived. As a Native American, Gertrude fought to give her people a voice and to educate leaders about the ways and importance of America’s native people. These are gripping miniature dramas of good-hearted women, selfless providers, courageous immigrants and migrants, and women with skills to innumerable to list. Many were crusaders for social justice and women’s rights. All endured hardships, overcame obstacles, broke barriers, and changed the world. The author ties the stories of these pioneer women to the experiences of women today with the hope that they will be inspired to live boldly and bravely and to fill their own lives with vision, faith, and fortitude. To live with grit.

Cover photo: “Women with Schuetzen Rifles,” circa 1889. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-9831, used by permission. Cover design © Shadow Mountain 2016. Art Direction: Richard Erickson. Design: Heather G. Ward.

SEPT 2016

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MAR IANNE MONSON 3/9/16 4:05 PM

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Monson

On Sale Date: September 2016 Biography \ History • Hardcover • 6 x 9 • $19.99 • 208 pages ISBN 978-1-62972-227-6 • eBook ISBN 978-1-62973-468-2

Frontier Grit The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women

The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women

Frontier Grit

iscover the stories of twelve women who “heard the call” to settle the west and who came from all points of the globe to begin their journey. As a slave, Clara watched as her husband and children were sold, only to be reunited with her youngest daughter, as a free woman, six decades later. As a young girl, Charlotte hid her gender to escape a life of poverty and became the greatest stagecoach driver that ever lived. As a Native American, Gertrude fought to give her people a voice and to educate leaders about the ways and importance of America’s native people. These are gripping miniature dramas of good-hearted women, selfless providers, courageous immigrants and migrants, and women with skills too innumerable to list. Many were crusaders for social justice and women’s rights. All endured hardships, overcame obstacles, broke barriers, and changed the world. The author ties the stories of these pioneer women to the experiences of women today with the hope that they will be inspired to live boldly and bravely and to fill their own lives with vision, faith, and fortitude. To live with grit.

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Mar ianne Monson 3/16/16 1:35 PM

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Frontier Grit

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The author’s great-aunt Alice Robbins (left), born in 1893, pheasant hunting with a friend in Oregon.

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Frontier Grit The Unlikely True Stories

of Daring Pioneer Women

Mar ianne Monson

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To my pioneer ancestors both literal and metaphorical, and to Aria, pioneer girl rising

Photo credits: page ii: Courtesy of Alice Allred, used by permission. page 1: Nellie Cashman, courtesty of Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, AHS #1847. page 19: Clara Brown, photo in public domain. page 35: Abigail Scott Duniway voting, courtesy of The Oregonian, used by permission. page 53: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, photo in public domain. page 69: While this is not a hotel Luzena operated, it is representative of the hotels at that time. Metropolitan Hotel, courtesy of Library of Congress. page 83: Mother Jones, © Everett Historical/shutterstock.com. page 97: Zitkala-Sa, photo in public domain. page 113: Mary Hallock Foote, courtesy of Idaho State Historical Society, image #63-238.12. page 114: A Pretty Girl in the West, by Mary Hallock Foote, courtesy of Library of Congress. page 129: Martha Hughes Cannon, used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, USHS 11877. page 147: Donaldina Cameron and Chinese girl, used by permission, courtesy of Cameron House. page 167: There is no known photo of Charley Parkhurst. Photo of stagecoach © Everett Historical/shutterstock.com. page 179: There is no known photo of Makaopiopio. Map © Steven Wynn/istock.

© 2016 Marianne Monson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at permissions@ shadowmountain.com. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain. Visit us at ShadowMountain.com ataloging-in-Publication D ata Library of Congress C Names: Monson, Marianne, 1975– author. Title: Frontier grit : the unlikely true stories of daring pioneer women / Marianne Monson. Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2016] | ©2016 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011148 (print) | LCCN 2016012793 (ebook) | ISBN 9781629722276 (hardbound : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781629734682 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women pioneers—United States—Biography. | United States—History— 1865–1921—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies. Classification: LCC E663 .M73 2016 (print) | LCC E663 (ebook) | DDC 920.72—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011148 Printed in the United States of America Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii 1 Nellie Cashman: Gold Rush “Boomer”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Aunt Clara Brown: A Woman in a Thousand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3 Abigail Scott Duniway: Oregon Trail Suffragette. . . . . . . . . . . 35 4 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: First Mexican-American Female Novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 5 Luzena Stanley Wilson: Frontier Entrepreneur. . . . . . . . . . . . 69 6 Mother Jones: She Could Not Be Silenced. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 7 Zitkala-Sa: Dakota Sioux Rights Activist and Writer . . . . . . . 97 8 Mary Hallock Foote: Mining Town Author and Illustrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 9 Martha Hughes Cannon: Frontier Doctor and First Female State Senator. . . . . . . . . . 129 10 Donaldina Cameron: The Most Loved and Feared Woman in Chinatown. . . . . . . . 147 11

Charley Parkhurst:

Most Celebrated Stagecoach Driver in the West. . . . . . . . . . . 167 12 Makaopiopio: The Spirit of Aloha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

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“When I stop at one of the graveyards in my own county . . . I have always the hope that something went into the ground with those pioneers that will one day come out again.” —Willa Cather

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Chapter 1

Nellie Cashman Gold Rush “Boomer”

Born: 1845, County Cork, Ireland Died: January 4, 1925, Victoria, Vancouver Island, Canada

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“Why don’t you go West, young woman? The West needs people like you.” 1

The life of Nellie Cashman is made from the stuff of frontier yarns spun by the light of a glowing fire. With each telling, the stories grow more fantastic, supernatural, and unbelievable, until trying to separate the truth from the myths of her life is a lot like the work Nellie loved best—swirling a pan filled with silt and river water— turning it, turning it, turning it—watching for the briefest sparks of gold. Drawn by hopes of the mother lode, Nellie travelled the whole of the West, settling in outposts from Mexico in the south to the Yukon in the north. More than just the hope of striking it rich drove Nellie forward, however; it was pioneering she loved, in all its dirty, rough-tumbled glory. She reveled in the harshest and most demanding environments, where she could pit her indomitable will against nature’s forces, where people relied on each other for survival without any of the fancy trappings of society. When the outposts of California and Arizona became too civilized for Nellie, she moved on to places that remain frontiers to this day. In her eighties, she mushed a dog sled 750 miles in seventeen days across the frozen tundra of northern Alaska. This remarkable woman never tired of finding new ways to test her own endurance and will to survive. 3 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT To understand how Nellie Cashman developed the characteristics manifest in the American West, we return to Ireland in the 1840s, where absentee British landlords owned eighty percent of the land. Ruling from afar, this gentry class forced the Irish working poor to raise crops on behalf of corrupt overseers. While Ireland produced a wide variety of foods, the poor existed on one crop as the basis of their diet—the potato. When the potato crop failed multiple years in a row due to blight, starvation set in. In an appalling irony, Ireland continued to export grains and other foods throughout the famine. For this reason, many historians today consider the period known in Ireland as the Great Hunger to be genocide rather than famine. It is estimated that more than one million people died and another one million emigrated—a loss that amounted to more than twenty-five percent of the country within a few short years. Nellie later referred to the famine as Ireland’s “unequal contest between want and oppression.”2 Though it is unclear precisely when in 1845 Nellie was born and at what age she left Ireland behind, it is undeniable that her native land left a deep and lasting impression. From her early years, she emerged with a deep devotion to her Catholic religion, an immense appreciation for the freedom of the United States, a healthy disregard for the wealthy classes, and an awareness of what it means to suffer. She also established a pattern of leaving one place behind in search of a new beginning. From limited records, it appears that Nellie’s father may have been one of the million Irish who died in the famine; others say he lived to take his family to Boston. With or without her husband, Nellie’s mother and her daughters sailed for America in a “coffin ship,” whose notoriously tight quarters and inadequate food ran rampant with disease. The women landed in Boston, where the working class resented the arrival of desperate Irishmen willing to work for a pittance. “No Irish Need Apply” signs hung in many 4 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman shop windows, and the people of Boston—by and large—considered the Irish to be “a servant race.”3 Despite this, the women managed to find work and stayed in Boston for roughly fifteen years. Nellie found employment as a bellhop in a hotel for part of that time, where she once attended to General Ulysses S. Grant. The story goes that when she told the general she wanted to “do things” with her life, he replied, “Why don’t you go West, young woman? The West needs people like you.”4 She certainly did. Traveling with her mother, Frances, and sister Fannie, Nellie made her way to San Francisco. Some accounts say they went by ship via Panama, but the more likely scenario is that the women traveled by train on a special immigrant fare of forty dollars.5 Nellie arrived in San Francisco and fell in love with the rugged freedom of the West, where anything was possible and even an Irish girl could strike it rich. Irish made up a third of the population of San Francisco, and the strong anti-Irish Catholic sentiment primarily remained behind in the “civilized” world of the East. Shortly after the women arrived, Nellie’s sister Fannie became engaged to another Irish immigrant. In the prospering town of San Francisco, Nellie surely had plenty of marriage opportunities, but she stayed single, saying she “preferred to being pals with men to being cook for one man.”6 While Fannie settled into married life, Nellie decided to explore, yearning for gold, opportunity, and adventure. Though details from these years are scarce and accounts contradictory, it appears tales of rich-paying silver mines in Nevada drew Nellie and her mother first to Virginia City, then on to roughand-tumble Pioche, Nevada, notorious for brawls and gunfights. A lack of law enforcement took its toll on the town—in fact, seventytwo graves dotted Boot Hill before a single soul in Pioche died of natural causes. The settlement contained gold rushers, Mexicans, and Indians, but precious few women. Pioche had already blown up 5 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT and burned once before the women got there and boasted no fewer than seventy-two saloons and thirty-two brothels.7 A location as remote and rough as this one would hardly seem like a natural choice for two single women, but Nellie fell in love with both the miners and the mining way of life. One gold rusher said the biggest attractions of the lifestyle were “independence and absolute equality in the world of chance,”8 a description that couldn’t stand in greater contrast to the injustice Nellie had witnessed in Ireland. In Pioche, fortunes arose one day and burned to the ground the next. Intense freedom existed alongside intense suffering. Deeply energized by the appeal of “life at full tide,”9 Nellie set two goals for herself: the first was to make a great deal of money; the second was to help anyone in need along the way. In a pattern she would repeat many times, Nellie prospected for silver and opened a boardinghouse to supply a steady source of income. She never stayed long in one place. As soon as mining declined in one area, new reports of gold discoveries trickled in and Nellie’s itch for excitement drew her off, looking for new horizons to explore. Often termed “boomers,” gold rushers of this variety stayed in town for the initial mining boom and then made their way to the next. In 1873, the Pioche mines began to decline. Now in her twenties, Nellie settled her mother in San Jose and convinced an all-male party of miners to let Nellie join their prospecting expedition to British Columbia’s Northern Interior. A few hours south of the Yukon border, the Cassiar district had rarely been explored by anyone outside of native communities, and Nellie claimed to be the first white woman to see its dizzying glories, where the searing heights of the Rocky Mountains descend to frozen blue glaciers. Mountain goats inhabit the rocky peaks, and dense evergreen forests teem with grizzly bear and moose. The thundering Stikine River is a 6 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman river so wild that to navigate it is comparable to scaling the heights of Everest. Nearby, on the edge of Dease Lake, Nellie operated a boardinghouse and saloon and prospected surrounding streams and creeks. When the weather turned chill, Nellie left her mining comrades behind, heading south to Victoria to wait for the arrival of spring. Shortly after her arrival, however, word came that early winter storms had trapped her friends in Cassiar without supplies. Three groups led by officers attempted to rescue the stranded miners, but unusually harsh conditions drove them back. Though she had never faced a winter in the far North, Nellie decided their recovery was in her hands alone, and she hired six men to assist the effort. Convinced she was heading to her death, many of her contemporaries tried to dissuade her. The Victoria Daily Colonist reported, “Her extraordinary freak of attempting to reach the diggings in midwinter and in the face of dangers and obstacles . . . is attributed by her friends as insanity.”10 For seventy-seven days, Nellie’s group traveled by snowshoe, pulling sleds packed tight with hundreds of pounds of potatoes, lime juice,11 and other supplies. At times the trail entirely disappeared in a snowy abyss. When dogs could no longer pull through the deep drifts, Nellie strapped a sled to her own back and hauled it across the white expanse. Believing the party would never succeed, the commander at the nearest fort sent a rescue party to reclaim any survivors. When the troops showed up to “rescue” Nellie, they found her camped out on the frozen Stikine River, cooking supper over a campfire and whistling a merry tune. She invited the rescue party to take tea with her, and they later described her as “happy, contented, and comfortable.”12 Ever persuasive, Nellie managed to convince the group to return without her, contradicting their commander’s orders. And so her rescue operation continued on its way, in spite of a 7 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT few mishaps. For instance, one night an avalanche swept Nellie’s tent a quarter mile downhill. Unfazed, she dug herself out and continued the mission. By the time Nellie reached her former mining friends in Cassiar, they were extremely glad to see her. Several of the men had already succumbed to death from scurvy, and the survivors suffered from “bleeding sores and blackened limbs.”13 Nellie nursed the men with lifesaving lime juice and potatoes and proudly reported that no one else died after she arrived. This mission of mercy exalted Nellie from frontier woman to angel of mercy; many miners she rescued that day attributed miraculous powers to their hero, and the event prompted the bestowal upon her of the nickname “Angel of Cassiar.”14 Years later, one of the survivors on his death bed said, “If Nellie Cashman were only here, I’d get well.”15 Beyond her miraculous survival, during the course of the rescue mission Nellie fell in love with the Cassiar wilderness. She remained two years more in the area, prospecting and running businesses to raise money for the construction of a Catholic hospital in Victoria. The poet and miner Robert Service, who also spent time in Cassiar, described the enchantment of this land in the following words: “The snows that are older than history, the woods where the weird shadows slant; the stillness, the moonlight, the mystery, I’ve bade ’em goodbye—but I can’t.” The landscape similarly enchanted Nellie, lingering in her memory for decades. But if she returned from British Columbia ready for a change in weather, she certainly found it. After visiting family in San Francisco, Nellie wandered from Virginia City to Pioche, then on to Tucson, Arizona, where she briefly set up shop. In 1879, when silver mines began paying out at a new little mining outpost called Tombstone, she packed her bags and set off. The town of Tombstone resembled the early days of Pioche—a rough-and-tumble place filled with 8 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman brothels, bars, and miners hungry for gold. A newcomer is said to have exclaimed, “All Tombstone needs to become the garden spot of the world is good people and water.” A veteran prospector chuckled and responded, “Well stranger . . . I reckon that’s all hell needs.”16 Nellie opened a variety of businesses, including the Nevada Boot and Shoe Store and the Arcade Restaurant and Chop House. She later focused on an upscale restaurant and hotel named Russ House, where patrons could choose from dishes such as lamb in c aper sauce, beef á l’Espagnol, calf head in tortue, and chicken fricasee á la crème. Both the famous and infamous found their way to Nellie’s table. If they couldn’t afford to pay, Nellie fed the hungry and the luckless for free. Legend has it that on one occasion a patron had a bit too much to drink and made a disparaging comment about the food served at Russ House. Doc Holliday, seated nearby, drew his revolver and pointed it at the patron. “What did you say about Miss Nellie’s food, mister?” the mustachioed lawman inquired. “Food’s delicious,” the man amended. “Good as I’ve ever tasted.” Doc Holliday returned his gun to his holster. “Yep, that’s what I thought you said.”17 From many reports, if Nellie wasn’t running her businesses or buying mining claims, she was fundraising for one of many charitable causes. She grubstaked18 miners down on their luck and raised five hundred dollars to help a miner who broke both legs in a mining accident. When an epidemic spread through town, Nellie turned Russ House into a makeshift hospital and helped nurse the sick herself. She fundraised for community efforts that led to Tombstone’s first school and hospital, and when a local priest asked for help raising money to build a Catholic church, she staged the city’s first theatrical production, a musical comedy entitled The Irish Diamond. Unlike other middle class women, Nellie accepted donations for her project from anyone who wanted to give—willingly working alongside both prostitutes and patrons. “Any man I ever met, if he needed my help, 9 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT got it,” Nellie said years later. “After all, we pass this way only once, and it’s up to us to help our fellows when they need our help.”19 Judging by Nellie’s Tombstone years, she was making plenty of progress toward her twin goals of getting rich and helping others. All who knew her predicted her life would continue on as a series of breathtaking adventures. But life is seldom predictable—even for Nellie. In 1880, an unexpected telegram from Fannie turned Nellie’s intentionally disordered world upside down. While Nellie traipsed around the coast searching for ore, sister Fannie stayed in San Francisco with her husband, eventually giving birth to five children. Change in the form of tuberculosis, one of the most deadly nineteenth-century diseases, visited their home. After a battle of some months, Fannie’s husband passed away, leaving her with five children to raise. When Nellie received the news, she immediately closed Russ House and joined her sister in San Francisco. Realizing that it would be much easier to support the brood in Tombstone, however, the women returned to the mining town, where they reopened the boardinghouse and restaurant, though eventually Nellie sold Russ House and focused on running the American Hotel with her sister. The children loved both their Aunt Nellie and the excitement of the frontier town, though sometimes things got a little rough. In 1882, fire burned much of Tombstone, in spite of the efforts of the bucket brigade. The fire damaged Nellie’s hotel, but she had insured it generously, so it was soon rebuilt. Danger of a human-made variety also stalked the streets, and Mike Cunningham, the oldest of the children, later recalled the trauma of seeing the injured and the dead lying in the streets of Tombstone after the shootout at the O.K. Corral. Nearby Bisbee also saw action of this kind, and on one occasion, when a string of innocent passersby died, the sheriff arrested and jailed the guilty parties. Nellie did not doubt their guilt, but her 10 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman compassionate heart couldn’t stand to see anyone suffer. She visited the prisoners, preaching religion out of concern for their immortal souls (her only known proselyting effort)—which seemed to be successful as she arranged the baptisms of several people. City leaders decided to make a little profit from the hangings, and officials built a public execution site, permitting patrons to witness the scene for a price. The word on the street was that, due to their many enemies, the bodies of the guilty would not rest in the ground for long. The situation horrified Nellie, and she promised the prisoners she would do her part to see them safely in the ground after they received their just desserts. Armed with hatchets at two in the morning, a handful of hours before the hanging, Nellie led a silent mob to destroy the execution grandstands. 20 By morning the stage had been rendered into kindling wood. After the prisoners were executed in a less public manner, Nellie spent several nights in the graveyard with her shotgun, guarding the graves from desecration. Wanderlust still visited Nellie, and in spite of her newly acquired family, she found time to lead an expedition to the Baja peninsula in 1883. Several variations of this story circulate—one version involves a Mexican who collapsed in the street. Nellie helped him inside, where he revealed nuggets of gold and said, “Mulege . . . go to Mulege” with his dying breath. The expedition through the Baja turned up very little gold and even less water, however. Nearly perishing from thirst, Nellie left the company and miraculously returned a day later with water to relieve the suffering. In some renditions of the tale, Nellie finds a mission home located near rich veins of gold, but promises the father that she won’t reveal the location to hordes of gold seekers intent on overrunning the site. Nellie’s biographers point out these stories are most certainly apocryphal, but their promulgation added to her fame. The only clearly established 11 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT facts include the party’s campaign to the Baja, where they failed to find gold, did not fare well in the extreme heat, and ended up in a Mexican jail cell, accused of commandeering a boat away from its drunk captain. Once they were released, the party returned to Tombstone with less gold in their pockets, but several new tales to tell. In 1884, Fannie succumbed to the same disease that had taken her husband’s life, and Nellie inherited five children, ages three to eleven. For three years, Nellie played the part of full-time mother to her nieces and nephews. As an adult, her nephew Tom recalled frequent baseball games in the vacant lot near the American Hotel. When squabbles over scores and losses grew loud enough for Nellie to hear, she hurried over and delivered a lecture on “self-control and sportsmanship,” handing out slices of pie “to seal the truce.”21 Soon the clever boys staged fake altercations, figuring the lecture was worth enduring for the sake of the pie. On another occasion, Mike and a friend decided to do some “prospecting” of their own. They packed up burros and rode fourteen miles into the Dragoon Mountains, an area made famous both for its silver deposits and roving bands of Apache Indians angered by mining activity on their land. The boys took shelter in an old cabin, but their courage faded along with the daylight. As Apache signal fires dotted the landscape, they huddled in one corner of the cabin, afraid for their lives. Fortunately, a prospector had recognized the boys on their way out of town and reported the escapade to Nellie. In the dark, she tracked them down to the cabin with the burros tied up outside. Through the open door she called, “Hello the house!” Flooded with relief, the two miscreants gratefully followed her back to Tombstone.22 The collapse of the mining industry in Tombstone in 1886 caused Nellie to close the doors of her hotel forever. Children in tow, 12 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman she tried her luck in several spots in Montana and Wyoming but quickly realized this was no way to raise children. For one thing, the educational opportunities in mining towns were sketchy at best; for another, mining involved constant relocating. Concerned for their best interests, Nellie took the kids to San Francisco and settled them into a Catholic boarding school. Though this seems a hard solution by today’s standards, Nellie maintained a good relationship with the children throughout their lives, writing often, maintaining financial support, and visiting them between mining expeditions. Unencumbered once more, Nellie bounced around the West, following one mining boom after another. In 1897, the discovery of gold in the Klondike beckoned Nellie back to the white and frozen land she loved. She would spend the last two and a half decades of her life in Alaska, with periodic returns to visit family and friends. Just getting to Dawson proved the first adventure. Nellie landed at Skagway, then drove a loaded dogsled 600 miles, wearing a fur hat, rubber boots, and men’s trousers. Her intended route necessitated climbing the infamous Chilkoot Pass—twentysix grueling miles so steep that horses and dogs cannot make the climb. Miners ascended on 1,500 stairs cut from ice, holding on to picks and guide ropes, with supplies and a sled strapped to their backs. The final four miles are practically vertical. As many as half of those who attempted the pass did not make it; they either fell to their death, turned back, or perished by avalanche. Nellie, with her sweet-talking brogue, somehow convinced the North-West Mounted Police that she could survive on less than the required supplies (one ton), and she conquered that pass. She camped that winter on Lake Laberge, and when the ice broke up on the Yukon River, she rode the rapids on a hand-built raft into town. Once in Dawson, Nellie opened a restaurant and grocery store, and started staking out her claims. The mining was some of the 13 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT most productive in her whole career, and she drew 100,000 dollars from the claim, much of which she gave to charity. Nellie said of Dawson, “That was a great place to meet interesting people.”23 Indeed, the Klondike Gold Rush drew all sorts, and Nellie enjoyed the company of writers Jack London, Joaquin Miller, and Captain Jack Crawford during her time there. Once again Nellie became the darling of the settlement, and legend has it that when fire threatened the town, Nellie asked for a bowl of holy water. According to several eyewitnesses, the moment she threw the water into the fire, the wind instantly changed direction, saving much of the city,24 an incident that earned her the nickname “Doll of Dawson.” Though Nellie loved the remoteness of Alaska, she would occasionally return to California to visit the children and be interviewed by the press. On one visit to California at the age of sixty-seven, Nellie was asked by a reporter if she planned to retire soon. She responded in the negative. “I’m mighty apt to make a million or two before I leave this romantic business of mining.”25 Apparently even Dawson proved too sedate for Nellie. She moved on to Fairbanks, then continued to Nolan Creek at Coldfoot, sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle, an area inhabited by Koyukan Indians and a scant handful of the hardiest prospectors. Here she started the Midnight Sun Mining Company to fund her shaft mining enterprise. Increasingly reclusive, Nellie said, “It takes real folks to live by themselves in the lands of the north. . . . It takes the solitude of frozen nights with the howl of dogs for company, the glistening fairness of days when nature reaches out and loves you . . . to bring out the soul of folks. Banging trolley cars, honking horns, clubs for catty women, and false standards of living won’t do it.”26 In 1924, now in her seventies, Nellie took her last trip to the outside world. To get there, she drove a dogsled team 750 miles in seventeen days. Newspapers declared her the “champion musher of 14 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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Nellie Cashman the world” for the accomplishment.27 Her nephew Mike, now grown with a family of his own, begged her to stay in California, but she laughed and said, “I’m a long way from the cushion rocker stage”28 and then shocked her family by returning to Alaska by airplane. For a few more years, Nellie continued her mining operations, but she finally ran out of adventures when she checked herself into the hospital in Victoria she had helped build forty years earlier. Eventually, this hardened wanderer succumbed to complications from pneumonia at the age of eighty.

W Nellie’s life leaves me a bit breathless. Life was, to her, an endless thrill with a steady supply of new things to see, do, and try. She credited her youthful appearance with this lifestyle, and I wonder if perhaps she isn’t right. In the words of Thoreau, “Life pines because it breathes its own breath over again.”29 Maybe Nellie stayed young because she constantly woke up to new possibilities. If you contrast her life with the one she might have spent in Boston, the disparity is phenomenal. I admire that in a world that viewed her as a poor Irish Catholic, she refused to accept society’s estimation but dared to believe in another view of her gifts and abilities. She lived the mantra: “Go where you are celebrated, not merely tolerated.”30 Nellie crossed a continent in search of “her people,” and she certainly found them. In the process, she also found a good deal of adrenaline and respect. Her heart was as big as her thirst for gold, and this attribute tempered the gold fever that consumed many a miner. Nellie never forgot the reality of suffering, even when that suffering was not her own. To me, her legacy is one that says: push on until you find your place in this world, the place that fills you with fire and devotion. You’re never too old to go looking for it, even if you have to search the whole world over. In the words of her obituary, “The ‘old 15 DO NOT DUPLICATE

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FRONTIER GRIT sourdough’ has passed on, leaving many records behind—pioneer of Arizona, the first woman prospector in Alaska, the world’s champion musher—but better by far than all of these is the fact that she lived—lived and enjoyed adventures that it is not given most the courage to taste.”31 In honor of Nellie, let us find our courage to do the same.

Further Reading Don Chaput, Nellie Cashman and the North American Mining Frontier (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 2010). Suzann Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman: Prospector and Trailblazer (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1993). Suzann Ledbetter, Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women (New York: Tom Doherty Assoc., 2006). Claire Rudolf Murphy and Jane G. Haigh, Gold Rush Women (Portland, OR: Alaska Northwest Books, 1997). Sally Zanjani, A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850– 1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

Notes 1. Suzann Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman: Prospector and Trailblazer (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1993), 2. 2. Ibid. 3. University of Virginia. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/omara-alwala/irishkennedys.html. 4. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 2. 5. Frances Laurence, Maverick Women: 19th Century Women Who Kicked Over the Traces (N.p.: Manifest Publications, 1998). 6. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 3. 7. Sally Zanjani, A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850–1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 30. 8. Ibid., 31. 9. Ibid. 10. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 7. 11. Potatoes and lime juice were known remedies for scurvy. 12. Zanjani, Mine of Her Own, 34. 13. Ibid., 35. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 7. 16. Ibid., 14.

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Nellie Cashman 17. Ibid., 19. 18. “Grubstaking” is a mining term for lending a prospector money to continue his or her efforts, expecting to see a return on the profits. 19. Suzann Ledbetter, Shady Ladies: Nineteen Surprising and Rebellious American Women (New York: Tom Doherty Assoc., 2006), 105. 20. Some sources indicate that Nellie did not, in fact, lead the efforts to destroy the grandstand, though she supported the endeavor. Ron Fischer, in an interview with Mike Cunningham’s stepdaughter, confirmed that Mike certainly believed that Nellie led the attack (see Ron W. Fischer, Nellie Cashman: Frontier Angel [Honolulu, HI: Talei Publishers, 2000]). 21. Ledbetter, Shady Ladies, 31. 22. Zanjani, Mine of Her Own, 46. 23. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 48. 24. Zanjani, Mine of Her Own, 54. 25. Ibid., 57. 26. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 51. 27. Karen Surina Mulford, Trailblazers: Twenty Amazing Western Women (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 2001), 46. 28. Ledbetter, Nellie Cashman, 48. 29. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: T.Y. Crowell & Company, 1899), 219. 30. Paul F. Davis, quoted at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/126432-if-you-don-t-feel-it-flee-from -it-go-where. 31. Ledbetter, Shady Ladies, 107.

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